Julien’s window. He woke and looked out, rumpled with sleep. When he saw her, he knew. Julien pulled on his clothes and took the stairs two at a time. He brought his rucksack with him. He had decided that if they should leave, he would go with them and had already written a note for his parents, wherein he did his best to explain his disappearance. But when he reached the kitchen, there was his mother, waiting for him. Since Victor had vanished she hadn’t once slept through the night. Now she’d heard stones flung up to his window.
“What are you doing?” she asked him. “Do you think you’re going somewhere?”
“Mama,” Julien said. He could see that her hands were shaking. “I must.”
“And do what your brother did? Abandon us?”
He came to sit beside her. She was brokenhearted. He had never seen her cry before, and now tears streamed down her face. “It’s not like that.”
“It’s that girl,” Claire said.
“Not at all.”
She gave a short bitter laugh. “You’re too young for such things anyway. You’re a baby.”
“It’s time to go. You know it’s true.”
“When your father says it’s time, it’s time!” Claire’s expression was set, her eyes bright with hurt. If she lost her children she lost everything. The house and all the time she’d spent on keeping up appearances meant nothing. This was her heart, sitting beside her, the boy who looked anxiously through the window, so ready to leave. “Go on,” she said. “Go! But you tell your father, not me. Wake him up and tell him. Look at his face while you do so. Then you can leave.”
Julien thought of the look on his father’s face as he’d buried his papers. Most likely all of his writings would rot in the ground before anyone could dig them up again. He was well aware that his father cried late at night, alone in the library. There were hardly any books left, and the empty shelves haunted him.
“Tell him right now!” Julien’s mother said. “And then you can break my heart because we will never see each other again.”
Because he could not do that to her, Julien left his rucksack on the chair and went into the garden. As soon as Lea saw his expression she knew he wasn’t going.
“My parents,” he said. “My mother.”
His mother was in the doorway now, watching. Even from a distance Lea could tell she was crying.
“I’ll write to you,” Lea told Julien.
Julien smiled, a weary look on his face. She could tell he didn’t believe her, but he was wrong. She would find a way. Julien was so tall Lea was forced to stand on tiptoe as she leaned closer. There was only one thing he had to do and they would surely see each other again.
“Stay alive,” she told him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE FARAWAY PLACE
HAUTE-LOIRE, SPRING 1942
THE SOLDIERS ARRIVED WHEN MARIANNE was in the woods, looking for the chickens that had run off into the underbrush. She’d been distracted when she noticed a milan royal, the red kite that was so fierce and beautiful only members of the royal family in France had been allowed to fly it in the practice of falconry. She’d climbed along a ravine to watch, then stretched out on the hill, sprawled in the grass. She was thinking about Victor, though she probably shouldn’t. The shadows grew long and she realized it was late. She began the trek home, embarrassed that she’d failed to find the chickens. When she saw the trucks, she ducked into the underbrush. By then the soldiers were taking the cows, which lowed as they were forced into trucks and pulled against the thick ropes looped around their necks. A cow had been shot in the pasture, an act of thoughtless savagery. Flies buzzed over the blackened blood. Marianne’s father came out with a shotgun, and one of the soldiers grabbed the gun and hit him over his skull. When he was on the ground several of the soldiers kicked him with their heavy boots until he stopped moving.
“Don’t be a fool, old man,” one told him. “Next time we’ll shoot you instead of the cow.”
Marianne sank down behind the hedges with one hand over her mouth so she wouldn’t cry out. She was shattered by what she saw, but knew it would do no good to run into the fray and be beaten herself, perhaps raped and murdered in a failed attempt to help her father. Still, her inaction stung. She pinched herself, hard,